What Twitter’s New Video Feature Means For Your Employee Training Program

Twitter is, of course, far from the first social communication tool to embrace video. Instagram introduced video capture years ago. Facebook now expects the majority of its posts to be video within the next 5 years. Even Twitter has dabbled with video previously, purchasing the video sharing network Vine — where today users now share more than 8,000 videos daily.

Most significant of all — and in a class so far apart by itself we need a new paragraph for it — is the once-tiny outpost known as YouTube. Now the titan of web video, it’s easy to forget that just 10 years ago the site was created as a niche site for uploading recordings. Today more than half of all internet users visit the site each month, and more than 100 hours of video are uploaded there each day. And as an informational resource, YouTube’s search engine is second only to parent company Google’s in terms of annual queries — more people look for information on YouTube than do so on Yahoo or Bing.

Adding video to a Tweet | from Twitter

This week’s announcement means Twitter has now directly joined the near-universal ranks of social tools that have embraced video as an important part of the way people communicate and share ideas with one another.

That Twitter in particular has made the move is especially meaningful — this is, after all, a platform made famous by it’s short form, 140 character text format. Twitter wanted to distill information to it’s essence — now it’s recognized that video can be an irreplaceable medium for doing exactly that.

But What Does That Have To Do With Employee Training?

Twitter’s recognition of the potential of video as a means of delivering information — and especially, doing so in the social context of sharing ideas between friends and peers — should reinforce the value that technology in general and video in particular can help organizations harness when applied to corporate social learning.

Learning and development professionals have long understood the importance of informal knowledge sharing as a key part of on-the-job learning. The 70:20:10 model estimates that those little interactions between colleagues make up the vast majority of any organization’s learning environment — but to date, the institutional expertise shared there has been difficult to capture.

Much as social networks like Facebook and Twitter began life as text-only formats, many organizations first sought to tap into the knowledge of their own internal networks with text-based knowledge management tools. Learning teams spun up wikis and forums and dozens of other outlets — but just as the big names in social networking have found, on its own, text made sharing information both too much work for experts to bother with, and simultaneously, too complex and opaque for other team members to seek out and use.

Human beings are inherently visual creatures. In the 500 years since the advent of the printing press, 90% of all communication is still nonverbal. Video takes advantage of that innate preference — transforming text and making ideas more engaging and easier to follow and understand. Video greatly reduces the complexity of sharing information with video, enabling people to show instead of tell.

Video Makes Enterprise Social Learning Easy — And Accessible

Today most people are too busy to read a handbook from cover to cover. And even when well-illustrated with pictures at every step, fewer and fewer of us have the patience for instruction manuals. How people want to be taught today — the concept that YouTube has built its business on, and what Twitter today has added support for — is with simple, straightforward video that makes it easy to follow along, see each step in full, and rewind and repeat anything we don’t quite understand.

Perhaps even more exciting — as YouTube, Instagram, and now Twitter are proving every day — unlike previous forms of informal knowledge sharing, video is a tool people will actually use. Subject matter experts that previously didn’t have time to document insights or processes tend to open up when afforded the flexibility and efficiency of sharing with video. Likewise, many others who wouldn’t have had the patience to sift through text instructions (and would have just gone and distracted your experts with one-off questions) become more willing to attend to pre-recorded instructions when they come in video form.

For learning organizations, video social learning software can be the secret to exponentially scaling informal training, helping to preserve institutional knowledge, make sharing tips and best practices easy, and help you build a resource library others in your organization can count on as an invaluable reference for years to come.

See How Video Can Facilitate Social Learning In Your Organization

Panopto’s video platform makes supporting corporate social learning simple. With simple software that runs on any laptop, recognizes any recording device, and automatically manages all the backend production video requires, Panopto allows your team to click “record” and share their ideas — anytime, anywhere, any way that works for them.

And Panopto makes it just as easy to search your library of social learning content, with our industry-leading Smart Search video content search technology. Smart Search automatically indexes every word spoken or shown on-screen in every video in your library — whether or not it was recorded with Panopto — and enables you to instantly fast-forward right to the exact relevant moment.

Whether your team is recording on-site tips from field teams, complicated demonstrations in the R&D offices, or just simple how-tos for getting the most out of office systems and equipment, Panopto makes it easy to record anything and find everything. To learn more about how businesses around the world are using Panopto for social learning, or for a free 30 day trial of Panopto in your own organization, contact our team today.